I’d love to say that I write sci-fi. Really I… plan sci-fi. The writing is infrequent. (This is related to nix… eventually.)
I’m building a world where civilization has collapsed and restarted many times. Dig anywhere long enough and you’ll find microchips that nobody alive knows how to interface with. The status quo is shaped by ancient technologies that are still kicking in some way, typically with minimal understanding on the users’ part.
A rather important one of these has to do with aggregating verifiable claims and ensuring that appropriate parties verify them. Their economy is based on these verifications. So if you come across a bridge (unbeknownst to you) the tech will figure out who built that bridge and give you an idea about wether the people you trust for this sort of thing trust that person. Then–supposing it doesn’t collapse under you–it will contribute to an accounting system which ensures that the builder of that bridge is more likely to be fed, should they ask for food. That is, supposing the bridge builder asks somebody who participates in the same religion protocol. Not scarcity, reciprocity en masse.
Their relationship with this tech is purely inductive. Nobody understands it, but they have noticed that if they “pray” in the right ways (really “data entry” would be a better term, but they don’t know that), things tend to work out ok. This enables the masses to engage in feats of coordination. Things that would require great sacrifice by one person, are instead achieved by the small gestures of thousands (i.e. the will of the “gods”, which is really just each other).
My goal is to feel out the architecture of these systems well enough that they feel like something we could actually build. The things that happen to my characters are, more or less, test cases for my attempt at post scarcity economics. It’s perhaps a bit ambitious, but I am having fun anyhow.
So what brings me joy about nix is the way that it quickly gets its users on the same page about the state of things. When I run across other nix users in PRs or issues, it seems like we’re operating with a greater collective confidence. Others are still trying to discover the nature of the bug, but armed with greater consistency, we’ve already moved on to the “what should we do about it” phase.
Admittedly, claims like
The output of Derivation X hashes to Y
are much easier to verify than
The guy who made this bridge out vines is good at that sort of thing
We’re playing in the kiddy pool here. But structurally speaking, we’re already doing part of the thing that I want to prove is possible in my story. It gives me hope that the rest of that thing is also possible.